Codesealer blog

How Coronavirus is affecting the Cyberwar

The Corona – pandemic has turned daily life upside down. The global marked is bleeding, countries are closing down and many people are infected or yet to be. But in these troubled times another danger is showing its teeth – Cyberattacks:

The hackers and scammers are again using chaos on their behalf to make even more global damage than the pandemic itself.

Scams and fishing

Scammers are using the chaotic situation – an anxious population, excessive demands for goods no longer in stock, and masses of disinformation on social media – on their behalf to trick people to steal their money or sensitive information. And with half of the population working from home meaning the security is in its lowest, the situation is even more dangerous. Weliveseciruty.com wrote an in depth article here. The following is examples of the trendy Corona-scams.

Malicious news, meaning fake emails pretending to be WHO or some other health organisation that advocates to click a button. But the button will do no other than install a trojan in the system that hackers and scammers can use to steal your stuff. The picture is an example of a fake mail.

Fake websites, is another scam out there, looking like a real website or blog pretending to show stories or articles of Corona Virus, just that the many different buttons are in reality many dangerous buttons that will do bad stuff to your computer. Gadgetsnow wrote an article and posted the 14 most popular scamsites here

Another nasty scam is Exploiting the charitable spirit which are emails pretending to be from some health organization, asking people to help donate to a vaccine for children in China or other hit-by-Corona-countries. There is currently no vaccine available . Read more of this scam here

3) Scan your computer frequently with an antivirus program -especially if you feel suspicious.

For Windows, Windows Defender -pre-installed on most PC’s- is fine and for Mac you can use Malwarebytes. There are many good free antivirus out there.

And remember the best antivirus program is your head.

Cyberattacks

Scams hitting individual people with the purpose of stealing sensitive information is one thing. Large cyberattacks hitting government, businesses hospitals, vital infrastructure software etc is another. In a poll made by Threatpost 40% of the businesses answered that they are experience an increase in attacks. Some attacks are really tough – forcing the servers or electronic devices to shut down, stealing or damaging databases etc. Last week a Czech hospital specialized in Covid-19 were attacked. The attack was so powerfull that every device were disconnected, all the computer had to be shut down and all surgeries were cancelled! Still today a week later the databases are not fully operational and the medics have to write and transfer their notes MANUALLY which slows and confuses every proces on the hospital by an enormous amount, putting even more lives in danger. Read more here

Which countries are hit hardest

The countries that are hit hardest by the attacks are the countries which are being hit hardest by the Corona virus for reasons explained earlier. This graph from Cynet who wrote an article about it shows that Italy (hit hard by Corona) experience a double in the amount of attacks in the period 15/2 – 15/3.

Countries as China and France are also being attacked extra these days.

The IT-industry lifting the responsibility

Many IT businesses are standing together and facing the war against Coronavirus making their services free of charge so that people have better chances of living their normal life – protected from malware. The danish company Computerworld lists the businesses that participate in this demonstration. The headers being Cisco making their premium high quality video conference services free, Google with their Hangouts premium to free, Adobe Creative Cloud making their Media Composer Pro Tools free (for students that does not have acces to their normal facilities), Microsoft making the use of Teams free and many many more.

Codesealer solution

We offer in Codesealer – associated with Oswap – a very unique product recognized by Gartner that detects and protects businesses from malicious attacks. It is an end to end security strategy meaning that even though a computer might be infected with a trojan, when logging into the platform / bank / database the MITB will no longer be able to follow and will be detected. This is a unique tool to protect the information within a business database without spending millions of hours and money securing every individual employee device.

In spirit of the initiative mentioned above we will make our product CORE free of charge in a 6-months periode. CORE can protect hospitals, banks, businesses, schools, and every other platform where a login is required. Read more about Codesealer here

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